Murder Scene That Stuns Courtroom

By KENNETH B. NOBLE,

Published: January 25, 1995

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 24—
The jury, the victims' families and the press that crowded into Courtroom 9-307 had all been warned that, inevitably, the moment would come when grisly photographs from the death scene would be shown. But few, it seems, were prepared for the sight of the brutally slashed body of Ronald L. Goldman as it was flashed on the huge video monitor.

There was a sharp gasp from spectators, then choked sobbing. Frederic Goldman, the victim's father, lowered his head, pulled his glasses from his face and softly moaned. His wife, Patricia, grasped his shoulder, her face also tearful, trying to comfort him.

Juditha Brown, Nicole Brown Simpson's mother, slumped in her seat on the bench behind them. Next to her, her three daughters cried softly.

On the other side of the aisle, Mr. Simpson's family was equally distraught. One woman put her arm around Eunice Simpson, Mr. Simpson's mother, to comfort her and she grimaced, then took a deep breath.

Moments later, the spectators gasped again when prosecutors displayed a photograph of Nicole Simpson's body curled in a fetal position across a bloody sidewalk.

All the while, O. J. Simpson, seated at the defense table, wrote furiously, his face impassive, his eyes only intermittently leaving the notepad but steadfastly staying away from the views of the crime scene.

It was, perhaps, the only episode today that galvanized spectators who had seemed weary by waiting and by the drain on their emotions that the long wait had entailed.

They filed in quietly today, as yesterday, like parishioners coming to church, solemnly taking their assigned seats. And so they remained, subdued, attentive and ineffably sad.

At the afternoon recess, the Goldman family, seated in the front row of spectators, turned around, and grasped each other's hands and those of Lou and Juditha Brown and their daughters.

About 100 people who were in the courtroom today, including jurors and court officers, saw the enlarged photographs of the bodies of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman on a large video screen mounted above the witness stand. Judge Lance A. Ito ordered the television monitors that feed closed-circuit broadcasts to the pressroom and to the rest of the world blacked out before the photographs could be shown.

For most of today's session, however, lawyers on both sides of the Simpson case took pains not to overwhelm the jurors. Christopher A. Darden, the Deputy District Attorney who gave the first of the prosecution's opening statements, rarely raised his voice, maintaining a conversational tone, even stumbling at times. There was none of the fierce passion that had flared in earlier court appearances.

Marcia Clark, the chief prosecutor, who has often seemed aggressive and truculent during pretrial hearings before Judge Ito, was reserved, almost deferential as she spoke to the jury, measuring each word, especially when explaining complex evidentiary matters, like DNA testing.

Outside the Criminal Courts building here, opportunism tinged with neediness permeated the sidewalks as hundreds of people -- gawkers and souvenir hawkers -- crowded the sidewalks awaiting whatever excitement and discord might unfold within. Civility has been abandoned in the hustle to be a part of history, no matter how small the role.

One man carried a huge placard with a "wanted" poster of his mother that offered a $25,000 reward for her arrest. Not far away a vendor, wearing a tattered coat and a soiled, red cap, was selling baseball-card-sized photographs of Mr. Simpson dressed like a clown, with a red fright wig and bulbous nose. "Simpson Media Circus," the cards said, "1994/1995 season pass."

Los Angeles, of course, is accustomed to sensational trials and lawsuits and the camp followers who attend them. But the Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet never requested seats in the courtroom for the trial of the police officers who beat Rodney G. King; it has in the Simpson case. And French radio did not send correspondents to file dispatches from the trials of Lyle and Erik Mendendez for their parents' murder; it has in the Simpson case.

Indeed, the onslaught of several hundred journalists from around the world prompted the Radio and Television News Association, coordinator of the trial coverage, to rent a parking lot across the street, known by its inhabitants as "Camp O. J."

The lot is now home to more than 40 satellite trucks and air-conditioned trailers, many of which contain control rooms ready to go to instant live coverage of key testimony, closing arguments and the verdict. Cable television's Court TV is offering gavel-to-gavel coverage. CNN and E! Entertainment Television plan to offer extensive live coverage. Fox Broadcasting is providing its affiliates a feed from the courtroom's pool cameras, to be used at the affiliates' discretion. The three remaining networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, plan to cover opening statements, and then offer periodic trial updates.